The Trump administration, amid a series of foreign and domestic challenges, is redoubling its efforts to blame an array of outside forces for America’s problems and enact policies that block those influences from crossing U.S. borders.
Last week, the United States halted immigration applications from 19 countries. Shortly after, the administration announced an expanded travel ban covering more than 30 countries — “every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” in the words of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem.
And on Wednesday, Border Protection officials proposed requiring visitors from U.S. allies to provide up to five years of their social media history, a move that could discourage tourists.
The actions come on the heels of a 33-page National Security Strategy stressing the administration’s opposition to multilateralism and immigration, while scolding European allies that they risk “civilizational erasure” for taking a different approach. “Who a country admits into its borders — in what numbers and from where — will inevitably define the future of that nation,” the paper says.
These moves — accompanied by a bolstering of tariffs and President Donald Trump’s often racially tinged anti-outsider rhetoric — suggest a goal of sealing off the United States from many foreign people, products and cultures. They also signal that the U.S. is refocusing its attention on its immediate neighborhood in the Western Hemisphere, rather than the broader global landscape that has long been its horizon.
“We are isolating ourselves in a very dangerous way that I don’t think this administration understands,” said former senator Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska), who served as defense secretary under President Barack Obama. “We will find ourselves isolated — dangerously isolated — in a world where you do not want to be isolated. Once you go down that road, you will not get that back. That is not the way it works.”
Several experts said Trump’s language increasingly echoes the isolationism and anti-immigrant sentiment of the 1920s and 1930s, which downplayed the threat of authoritarianism before World War II. But White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the administration is trying to protect what is great about America.
“America’s culture and way of life is worth defending and preserving. Full stop,” she said. “Aliens who come to our country en masse and refuse to assimilate to American society only recreate the same conditions that are destroying the nations they fled from. We cannot allow their problems to become America’s problems.”
Trump’s wariness of foreign engagement has not prevented him from aggressively deploying U.S. power overseas on occasion, notably in his push to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. But even that is arguably part of his effort to shut out baleful foreign influences, in this case the flow of illegal drugs. (Many drug policy experts say Venezuela plays a minor role in shipping drugs to the United States.)
The administration has also bolstered its global tariff regime in recent days, threatening to impose an additional 5 percent levy on Mexico over a water dispute and announcing $11 billion in aid to farmers to ease their burden from the levies. That comes not long after Trump posted that the Supreme Court’s review of whether the tariffs are constitutional is “literally, LIFE OR DEATH for our Country.”
Trump’s rhetoric, meanwhile, has been inflammatory even for a president whose political career was propelled by sharp attacks on immigrants. The president’s recent invective has focused largely on two recent events — the shooting in D.C. of two National Guard members, allegedly by an Afghan national, and fraud charges against Somali immigrants living in Minnesota.
Trump has taken particular aim at Somalis, calling them “garbage” and attacking Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), a frequent Trump critic who was born in Somalia. In a speech Tuesday in Pennsylvania, Trump referred to Omar as “whatever the hell her name is, with the little ‘ching,’ the little turban,” making a circular motion over his head to illustrate.
“She comes from her country where — I mean, it’s considered about the worst country in the world, right?” Trump told the audience, which chanted “Send her back!” “They have no military. … They have nothing, they have no police. They police themselves, they kill each other all the time.”
Omar responded on X that “Trump’s obsession with me is beyond weird. He needs serious help.”
During the speech, Trump also confirmed a 2018 report in The Washington Post, which he had denied for years, that he used a slur in a White House meeting to characterize nations that purportedly send the U.S. undesirable immigrants.
“I say, ‘Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden — just a few — let us have a few from Denmark?’” he said, describing the 2018 meeting in Tuesday’s speech.
Ivo Daalder, a U.S. ambassador to NATO during the Obama administration, said such language illustrates the racism that often underlies Trump’s message. “I think it’s less anti-immigration than pro-White,” Daalder said. “Complaining that immigrants aren’t coming from Norway and Sweden and Denmark — what is different about them? It’s people who have a different color.”
White House officials said there are many differences between Scandinavian countries and Somalia that are unrelated to race, such as an effective government and a stable economy, and that Trump was referring to those.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, told Fox News recently that these immigrants’ inability to help their own countries shows why it is reckless to let them into America.
“If Somalians cannot make Somalia successful, why would we think their track record would be any different in the United States?” Miller said. “Go third-world country by third-world country … if these societies all over the world continue to fail, you have to ask yourself, if you bring those societies into our country, and then give them unlimited free welfare, what do we think’s going to happen? You’re going to replicate the conditions that they left over and over and over again.”
A similar sentiment is articulated, if more formally, in the administration’s National Security Strategy released Dec. 5. “The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over,” it declares, adding, “Our elites badly miscalculated America’s willingness to shoulder forever global burdens to which the American people saw no connection to the national interest.”
Many diplomats read that strategy as accepting the prospect of Russia looming over Europe and China dominating Asia as long as the U.S. can have its way in the Western Hemisphere. That would allow Trump to focus not on challenging autocratic superpowers but on blocking threats that are closer to home and might cross directly onto American soil, such as immigration, drugs and foreign businesses.
Seth Jones, a top defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the National Security Strategy ignores the growth of authoritarian regimes across the globe and today’s struggles of the world’s democracies.
“There is no discussion of that at all, which I find stunning,” said Jones, a longtime Defense Department official. “That founding principle of freedom and democracy is not a priority of the administration, it’s not a priority in this document, and it cuts against how the United States was founded. I’m not saying the result has to be installing democracy at the barrel of a gun. But not to highlight the democratic challenge at all?”
Charles Kupchan, who served on the National Security Council staff under Obama and President Bill Clinton, said Trump would probably go further in sealing off the country if he could.
“My read on Trump is that his instincts are isolationist,” said Kupchan, author of “Isolationism: A History of America’s Efforts to Shield Itself From the World.” “If he could have his way, he would pull up the drawbridge and focus on Northern America and annex Canada and buy Greenland and take over the Panama Canal, right back to the 19th Century.”
But, he added, international relations are now far too complex for such a far-reaching approach: “The world won’t let go.”
While many Republicans are uncomfortable with Trump’s efforts to withdraw the country from its international alliances, those influenced by his MAGA movement embrace it or even argue that the president should do more to sever those bonds.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) this week introduced a bill to pull the U.S. out of NATO, the transatlantic alliance that has been central to America’s security strategy since the end of World War II. “NATO is a Cold War relic. We should withdraw from NATO and use that money to defend our own country, not socialist countries,” Massie said in introducing his bill. “NATO was created to counter the Soviet Union, which collapsed over 30 years ago.”
Other Democrats and Republicans argue that NATO remains key to U.S. interests, given Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine and its threats to other American allies in Europe.
Even Trump’s critics concede that his message can resonate with much of the population, particularly his argument that the U.S. has wasted too much blood, money and time on costly, never-ending wars that have brought little benefit to Americans.
And immigration has proven a powerful issue for Trump from the moment he announced his first presidential run in 2015, as Democratic administrations have struggled to control the border and Congress’s efforts to pass a broad immigration law have floundered. “Aliens who come to America must love our great country, assimilate to our society, contribute to our economy, and embrace the American way of life — otherwise they should not be here,” said Jackson, the White House spokeswoman.
But Trump’s language and tactics when it comes to immigration go far beyond typical politics. In his latest presidential campaign, he repeated onstage the falsehood that Haitians in Ohio were eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs. More recently, Trump has dispatched federal agents into major cities, usually over the protests of their mayors, to conduct hard-hitting immigration raids. The Department of Homeland Security has signed a $140 million contract to buy six Boeing 737s, essentially giving the agency its own deportation fleet.
Experts say Trump is now cementing his longtime rhetoric into policy.
“What’s going on is the formalization of what in many ways has been the policy of the president since he returned,” Daalder said. “Trump sees the main threats to the United States in the world — the ones he has president has to protect against — as the ones that can actually affect life at home.”
Kupchan noted that the desire to detach the U.S. from the world has flared up before, including in the 1920s and 1930s before America entered World War II. Today, he said, America is tied more closely to other countries by digital, economic and other connections.
“The problem is that strategic detachment was attainable in the 19th century; it’s not attainable today,” Kupchan said. “This instinct to pull the United States back from the world will ultimately fail because it’s not possible.”
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